Sunday, May 15, 2016

by Craig Miller

FUD is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. There's a lot of mis-information about IPv6 circulating on the internet. Much of it is old, out-of-date, and just plain wrong.

Fear

The fear is that since IPv6 uses global addresses, external hosts can make inbound connections to your machine.

This is IPv4/NAT thinking. That somehow NAT is considered a security blanket that protects us from the nasty outside world. Before there was NAT (see Breaking the NAT Frame of Mind) there were firewalls to keep the bad guys out. Firewalls have improved immensely in the past 20 years. They are stateful, and do connection tracking. Modern firewalls will only allow outbound connections (by default), thus keeping the bad guys on the outside. Even your IPv6 enabled Home Router comes with an IPv6 connection tracking firewall.

Uncertainty

Another is the uncertainty that IPv6 leaks your MAC address to the internet. I find several things wrong with this:

This applied to SLAAC (Stateless Address Auto Config) initially, where the later 64 bits of the host address are formed from an EUI-64 (a 64 bit MAC address). However since RFC 4941 and IPv6 privacy extensions, this is no longer the case. A temporary, randomized, IPv6 is used for outbound connections. The temporary address is changed every 24 hours (by default). All major OSs support IPv6 privacy extensions.

DHCPv6 does not use the MAC address to create an IPv6 address, and therefore there is nothing to worry about in most Enterprise networks (which tend to use DHCPv6).

So what? What is someone going to do with your MAC address on the internet? MAC address by default is locally significant. That means once the packet crosses a router, the sender's MAC address is gone, replaced by the router's MAC address. Knowing the sender's MAC address has no value to the receiver.

Doubt

Last piece of FUD I want to cover, is that we are wasting address space, and the doubt that we'll have to go to yet another version of IP in a few years.

While it is true a /64 for every subnet seems like a lot of IP addresses per subnet, it is a change in the paradigm we have been living with in IPv4. Rather than tightly packed subnets, where an attack is easy, since there is a good chance when guessing an IPv4 address that there is a host there, the /64 creates a sparsely populated subnet, where it is hard to guess an IP address, and therefore harder to launch an attack (assuming one gets past the firewall, or it is an inside job).

There are enough addresses to give out a /56 to everyone. Yes, the IPv6 address space is that big. RFC 7421 is a good read on IPv6 address space. With the currently allocated 2000::/3 there are over 10 trillion /48 to be allocated. And that is less than 1% of the total IPv6 address space.

IPv6 has matured, and is ready

IPv6 has matured a lot since 1995 (RFC 1883). Over 10% of internet traffic is over IPv6 today. Large deployments, such as the huge server farms at Facebook at using IPv6. Lessons have been learned, the protocol has been improved. It is time to move past the IPv4 thinking, and start learning, deploying, and using IPv6. After all, it is the future of the Internet.